2022 Volume 7 Issue 2 Pages 83-96
The COVID-19 discovered at the end of 2019 has thrown the world into confusion. Under such situations, in Japan, the Prime Minister announced a policy to request temporary school closure (SC)of elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools, special schools, etc. nationwide, on February 27, 2020. In response to this, on the 28th of the following day, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology requested a temporary closure from March 2 of the same year until the start of the spring holiday, and the children were suddenly forced to take a long-term closure. It is not difficult to imagine that such a situation will have a great impact on the child's body and mind. Therefore, this study aimed to grasp the children’s troubles and parents’ worries during and after SC. In this study, we conducted the school survey about the number of enrolled students, location of school, the duration of SC and the web survey about children’s troubles and parents’ worries during and after school closure. These surveys were conducted in May 2020 with the cooperation of 31 public elementary and junior high schools in a metropolitan and 3 prefectures. The subjects were 31 persons (a person in a school) for the school survey and 14,903 child-parent pairs for the web survey. In the web survey analysis, 2,423 pairs of the survey during the SC (1,974 pairs of elementary school, 449 pairs of junior high school) and 1,341 pairs of the survey after SC (1,214 pairs of elementary school, 126 pairs of junior high school) data was used. The findings obtained as the results of this study are as follows. 1) Although these schools were closed for a shorter duration than those in foreign countries, they had the same closed period as many schools in Japan. 2) The top three children’s troubles faced during SC included “Can’t meet friends,” “Can’t go out outside as wish,” and “Lack of exercise,” and the top three parent’s warries faced during SC included “Can’t be taught study,” “Can’t go out outside as wish” and “Lack of exercise.” 3) Although the complaint rate of children’s troubles after SC decreased from those during SC in all 12 items, the newly established “Mask wear” and “No school events” after SC were shown the high complaint rate. 4) There were gaps in children’s troubles and parents’ worries, and it was speculated that there was difference in what they wanted from the school.
